I'll bump this as we go along this season. Kind of shocking to see we're 2-0 with Dame and Ant shooting 30% from three. 7 guys on the team averaging over a steal per game. Two years ago we only had 3 guys who averaged at least 1 steal, and the team leader (Roco) averaged 1.4. Nas looked better last night, and is only taking shots he's really confident in. We've been one of the very worst assist teams, but making up for it with FTA's (mostly from Dame and Jerami). Both opponents were even worse at assists.
Also worth noting that game 1 was against Off-Night and even Okpala was playing well on defense after the terrible 1st quarter. Game 2 was against the DPOY runner up. I expect to see one of Ant or Dame to go off in the backcourt vs the Lakers. Whoever-offense on Russ Sunday night.
I am already frustrated with Jerami Grant passing up 3-point shots and passing to lesser or poor 3-point shooters. Reminds me of Batum and Meyers Leonard. Why the heck is he passing to Winslow?
Great stats and I've been thinking our offense has been rusty and our defense lots of miscues and YET we won both games and our defense already looks lightyears better than it has since Oden was healthy (for about 5 minutes)!
Interesting to see how mediocre we are at shooting threes and good at defending threes. Not typical at all for the Blazers. Lakers game contribute a lot to both, I think. Ant's got to shoot himself out of this funk. Looks like he's still trying. Weird to have two double digit rebounders on a team as small as they are.
These are Ant's game logs. When he's not hitting threes he's not really finding other ways to contribute. Interesting that the worse he shoots threes, the more turnovers he has.
In Chauncey’s introductory press conference, he said that he wanted the team to shoot less 3’s. Well, here we are, 2nd to last in the league in 3PA per 100 possessions.
I wasn't aware of this. What was his rationale? We're undersized most nights. We aren't going to be a team that pounds people in the middle (unless it's in transition). So that would mean trading in threes for midrange twos in the half court offense. Phoenix had the best record last year while being 26th in 3PAs, so you can definitely win with midrange shots if your team is built for it. It feels like we're getting up and down more this year, but funnily enough we're 18th in pace this year, about the same as two years ago.
My guess would be that attacking the rim with perimeter players--if done well--results in an increase in free throws, which are significantly more efficient than 3s.
ORTG: 107.1 (25th) DRTG: 104.2 (5th) The ORTG is not surprising given how many close games they’ve played against good defensive teams. It may not improve drastically until the team gets through this murderous stretch of games. A couple of blow outs and the Blazers will jump into the Top 10 on the offensive side as well.
